What happens after AI destroys college writing? by Olivia Dailey

oid5 — 2025-10-05 20:42:03 UTC

No, AI is not a threat, but a technology that provides opportunities and possible benefits.

oid5 — 2025-10-05 20:59:35 UTC

AI is no different than other productivity tools like Google or Grammarly

oid5 — 2025-10-05 21:10:47 UTC

oid5 — 2025-10-05 21:15:49 UTC

"[Alex] relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs" (Hsu 2). "'I see it as no different from Google,' Eugene said, 'I use it for the same kind of purpose'"(Hsu 6).

AI is an opportunity for educators to explore practical, pedagogical applications

oid5 — 2025-10-05 21:17:24 UTC

AI promotes academic dishonesty and causes students to cheat themselves of the learning process

oid5 — 2025-10-05 21:18:27 UTC

AI devalues reading and writing, and critical thinking skills in a time when these skills have never been more important.

oid5 — 2025-10-05 21:58:25 UTC

oid5 — 2025-10-05 23:46:52 UTC

“Large language models like ChatGPT don’t “think” in the human sense — when you ask Chat GPT a question, it draws from the data sets it has been trained on and builds an answer based on predictable word patterns" (Hsu 2).

oid5 — 2025-10-05 23:49:37 UTC

"When ChatGPT landed, instructors adopted various measures to insure that students' work was their own. These included requiring them to share time-stamped version histories of their Google documents, and designing writing assignments that had to be completed in person, over multiple sessions. But most detective work occurs after submission" (Hsu 3-4).

oid5 — 2025-10-05 23:51:52 UTC

Alex said, “Any type of writing in life, I use AI" (qtd. in Hsu 2) and that he is “trying to do the least work possible” (qtd. in Hsu 3). He also used ChatGPT to draft his application to NYU - “I guess it’s really dishonest, but fuck it, I’m here” (qtd. in Hsu 5).

oid5 — 2025-10-05 23:59:45 UTC

"Even for the most mercenary of students, the pursuit of a grade or diploma has come with an ancillary benefit. You’re being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning. But the arrival of AI means that you can now bypass the process, and the difficulty, altogether” (Hsu 5-6).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:02:22 UTC

"59% of college and university leaders reported an increase in cheating" (Hsu 5) but “there are no reliable figures for how many American students use AI, just stories about how everyone is doing it” (Hsu 6)

AI allows students to live fuller lives in college, which is no longer just about constant studying.

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:06:32 UTC

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:11:04 UTC

Corey Robin "has become a believer in the passage-identification blue-book exam, in which students name and contextualize excerpts of what they've read for class" (Hsu 7).

Siva Vaidhyanathan "is [also] pondering the logistics of oral exams" (Hsu 8).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:12:30 UTC

"Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using AI to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether" (Hsu 10).

"What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?" (Hsu 13)

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:15:09 UTC

"One way of viewing AI is as an intervention in how people choose to spend their time... even if today's students spend less time studying, they don't feel significantly less stressed. It's the nature of campus life that everyone assimilates into a culture of busyness, and a lot of that anxiety has been shifted to extracurricular or pre-professional pursuits" (Hsu 9).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:16:51 UTC

"Has there ever been a time in human history when writing was so important to the average person? The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day... our era of "mass writing." It's possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same AI assistants" (Hsu 7).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:21:43 UTC

"ChatGPT helped [May] breeze through busywork and depend her engagement with the courses she felt passionate about. 'I was trying to think, Where's all this time going? ...I sleep more now'" (Hsu 11).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:25:20 UTC

"The return of blue-book exams might disadvantage students who were encouraged to master typing at a young age... But neuroscientists have found that the "embodied experience" of writing by hand taps into parts of the brain that typing does not. Being able to write one way --even if it's more efficient-- doesn't make the other way obsolete" (Hsu 11).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:32:12 UTC

"What if we take seriously the idea that AI assistance can accelerate learning -- that students today are arriving at their destinations faster?" (Hsu 13)

Growing AI usage reveals problems with the purpose and structure of higher education and HOW students are being taught to write

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:34:00 UTC

AI usage directly contributes to a decline in human literacy and intelligence

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:39:28 UTC

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:44:52 UTC

"the students I spoke with... worked hard -- but part of their effort went to editing out anything in their college experiences that felt extraneous. They were radically resourceful" (Hsu 17).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:48:09 UTC

"According to a study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, human intellect has declined since 2012. Andreas Schleicher... hypothesized that the way we consume information today -- often through short social media posts -- has something to do with the decline in literacy" (Hsu 15).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:51:04 UTC

"Students are raised to understand achievement as something discrete and measurable, but when they arrive at college there are people like me, imploring them to wrestle with difficulty and abstraction. Worse yet, they are told that grades don't matter as much as they did when they were trying to get into college -- only, by this point, students are wired to find the most efficient path possible to good marks" (Hsu 14).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:53:58 UTC

"The No Child Left Behind Act, from 2002, instituted standards-based reforms across all public schools, resulting in generations of students being taught to write according to rigid testing rubrics. ...Students excelled when they mastered a form of 'bad writing'" (Hsu 8).

oid5 — 2025-10-06 00:59:31 UTC

"Studies show that AI is particularly effective in helping non-native speakers acclimate to college-level writing in English" (Hsu 6).

Main Question

oid5 — 2025-10-06 01:51:47 UTC

Does the use of generative AI pose a threat to college students’ critical thinking and writing skills? How will it affect higher education in the future?

Yes, AI is a threat to critical thinking and writing skills.

oid5 — 2025-10-06 01:52:36 UTC

analysis/interpretation

oid5 — 2025-10-09 16:31:27 UTC

For many students, AI is not thought of as a harmful cheating tool, but as another online productivity tool. They use it to help them get a head start on assignments, or streamline and simplify the homework process. Different AI tools can serve different needs.

analysis/interpretation

oid5 — 2025-10-09 16:48:12 UTC

Some college/university administrations have encouraged professors and students to take advantage of the potential revolutionary benefits AI has to offer. If it is going to change the shape of education anyway, why not take advantage of it? Some educators have fully jumped on the AI train, looking for ways it can supplement or improve their teaching pedagogy.

analysis/interpretation

oid5 — 2025-10-09 16:49:00 UTC

Some students have not chosen to use AI out of laziness, but to improve their work/life balance. College has evolved from just being about studying, to a place to network and start pursuing your career. There is only so much time in the day, and ambitious students must look out for their well-being. For some, this means using AI to speed through less important classes and clearing up more time in the day for what is really important to them, or to take care of their bodily needs. Students did not choose to have AI introduced into their lives. But now that it is here, they are choosing to benefit from it as much as they can.

analysis/interpretation

oid5 — 2025-10-09 16:49:40 UTC

Studies have shown that human literacy rates are falling, and using AI (which is not actually intelligent, but a statistics machine that predicts what its users want to hear) results in a measurable decline in literacy and critical thinking skills. It's a slippery slope; they can easily go from only using AI for small, administrative tasks to consulting it for everything, never giving themselves a chance to use their own thinking at all.

analysis/interpretation

oid5 — 2025-10-10 17:19:50 UTC

The use of AI is notoriously difficult to regulate. It can often imitate an undergraduate's writing skill enough to pass detection and receive a decent grade. Many students acknowledge that they are cheating but feel little remorse, since it allows them to bypass the difficulty of school and still receive the accolades (but not all the benefits of learning). Some educators attempt to regulate AI use in the classroom, to mixed results.

analysis/interpretation

oid5 — 2025-10-10 17:23:07 UTC

We live in a text-based society. While this constant barrage of text can be overwhelming and may be part of what tempts people to use AI, this is not the solution. We need to be able to distinguish between original writing, machine-generated-text, and be able to identify propaganda. If more people continue to let AI do their writing for them, the ability to compose original writing (and by default, be able to properly analyze other kinds of writing) will become of utmost value.

analysis/interpretation

oid5 — 2025-10-11 00:40:51 UTC

The mass adoption of AI points to long-standing problems in K-12 education. They are taught to write, mechanically, to pass tests and not in an individualized manner that will instill a lifelong appreciation for writing, because schools don't have the bandwidth for individualized learning. They are taught to think rigidly about school, that grades are the most important thing. Students often think if they use AI, they are guaranteed a good grade. It is more risk-free. But in college, every professor has their own teaching style, and grades are not as important. As professors become aware of this, they have turned to alternative forms of testing like blue books and oral exams that ensure students are actually comprehending the class material. These tests can be a learning curve, but have ancillary benefits of their own.

oid5 — 2025-10-11 22:09:16 UTC

"Despite all the current hysteria about students cheating, they aren't the ones to blame. They did not lobby for the introduction of laptops when they were in elementary school, and it's not their fault that they had to go to school on Zoom during the pandemic. They didn't create the AI tools, nor were they at the forefront of hyping technological innovation. They were just early adopters, trying to outwit the system at a time when doing so has never been so easy. And they have no more control than the rest of us" (Hsu 16-17).